By Leah Sander
InkFreeNews

WARSAW — Dr. Rob Ryan has “always wanted to connect with people.”

“The more that you connect with people, the more you realize how much hurt and difficulty there is in the world,” he said. “And I always felt that I was able to handle that, to hear difficult things, to be present with them.”

“Definitely listening to a person while they’re going through challenging times and to walk with them through it has been something that’s been rewarding,” he continued.

Ryan became the president and CEO of Bowen Center on July 1, having worked for the private mental health nonprofit in a variety of roles since 2004.

The groundwork for his future career was laid when he was young as he “had a sense of empathy with people” starting then.

“If I saw outsiders or people that weren’t necessarily part of the cool group, I was attracted to pulling them in and making sure that they felt like an insider,” he said. “Interestingly I would argue that my best friend in my life came from one of those examples.”

“I think that’s one of the things that I see with mental health is so important that you know people who are different, who maybe don’t always fit in, they have value,” he continued.

Ryan, who’s originally from near Toronto, Canada, first moved to the U.S. to attend college.

“I became a U.S. citizen in 2006,” he said, noting that living in the U.S. led to his career and family. He’s married with two daughters.

“It’s been very good to me,” he said of the country.

Ryan has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s degree in community counseling, an educational specialist in school psychology and his doctorate in counseling psychology, having studied at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Mich.

It was Bowen that brought Ryan to the Warsaw area.

“In 2004, I came here as an intern and I loved the culture, I loved the mission and I loved the patients enough that I wanted to stay,” he said.

He mentioned his Bowen internship was “focused on getting people the skills to be confident and competent in their job.”

“I just really appreciated that aspect because (at other places) it was still very heavily focused on treatment or the use of technology, and here it was when you’re done, you’re going to be a psychologist and we want you to be successful and ready to go,” he said.

“So in all honesty they helped me grow as a clinician to the place where I could have worked independently, but when you do a year internship, you gain relationships, and it wasn’t that difficult to see staying,” he continued.

Ryan then worked as director of Bowen’s Marshall County office for seven years.

He said taking part in the federal government’s National Health Service Corps program, which helped pay back his student loans while he worked at Bowen, motivated him to stay with the organization.

“The purpose of that program is to draw people with specialized skills to rural areas or underserved areas, and I argue that it works because I came, I stayed and then when I turned around and then I was done, I was six-plus years in,” he said. “The question was, well, what am I going to do now? And the answer was simple because it’s like you’re invested in the community by then, I was fully engaged with Marshall County, and you just go, of course, I’m staying here, so it’s a program that works for sure.”

Following his Marshall County stint, he served in several roles as part of the Center’s executive team before taking the helm in July.

He said his goal as Bowen’s president and CEO is expanding the Center’s reach.

Bowen focuses on its five core counties of Kosciusko, Marshall, Whitley, Wabash and Huntington.

“We have physical services in 10 counties and remote services in over 34,” said Ryan.

“There are some counties where we approach … 10% of the population of that county in a given year, and yet there are still people who we know need our services who don’t come and there’s many reasons for that,” he said. “They don’t have access. They believe they can’t afford it. There’s a stigma with mental illness.”

Seeing more people involves the total health movement started at Bowen under Ryan’s predecessor, Kurt Carlson. Under that, Bowen has expanded into physical health as it believes that it and mental health are intertwined.

“(People are) much more likely to go see (their) primary care physician possibly than going to see a therapist, but when you come to see your primary care physician here at the Bowen Center who’s trained to identify mental health needs, we can then right there in that appointment address any of those mental health needs,” explained Ryan.

“People who struggle with mental illness, although also don’t have great access to primary health care, so the patients we already see, we’re adding the service of primary health care because we understand that uncontrolled health challenges throughout the life turn into chronic health conditions, which then eat away at years of the end of a person’s life and definitely the quality,” he continued.

He added that helping others with their mental health also improves the lives of those around them.

“Living in our area, I definitely try to emphasize that our goal is not just to reduce the symptoms of mental illness, the other is just to return them to work, to return them to their families, to return them to (getting) useful and meaningful work from this society,” he said.

Bowen’s next foray into total health involves adding dentistry and optometry, said Ryan.

“It goes back to dignity, you know if I’m in my 40s and I don’t have all of my upper teeth, what I can eat changes, my confidence in going for a job interview might falter and if I want to have a relationship … you might be embarrassed to do that,” said Ryan. “We know that … often uncared for eyesight problems contribute to younger kids having behavior difficulties, older people having difficulties with continuing with jobs or being able to have certain jobs.”

He said Bowen’s not trying to compete with others already providing physical, dental and optometry services in the area, but helping “fill in the gap” of assisting some people who may not be able to access the other providers for payment reasons.

Ryan reflected on how mental health needs are locally following the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic. He mentioned that if it were possible to say there was a “silver lining of the pandemic,” it would be that people have become more attuned with their own mental health.

“It’s not that there’s so much more mental health needs in our area, it’s that people have stopped and said, ‘You know what, maybe I need help for this. Maybe this has risen to the level where I should go see somebody,'” he said. “And in a strange way, by talking more and more about some complex health issues, I think it’s helped to lower some of that stigma and so some of our extra people who are calling us, maybe always struggled with it, but they just never felt comfortable picking up the phones (before).”

With more people seeking help, Bowen can improve itself by hiring more staff, said Ryan.

“Finding a master’s level clinician to work in a rural area is a challenge,” he said. “We have around 110 therapists. I’m going to say 60-75 of those are still working in those five core counties. We could probably increase that by 25-30% tomorrow and be booked the very next day.”

“One of our challenges is how do we create an environment that really attracts new graduates to us and then take those people who are wanting to be working in private practice or those ones who are licensed and working in other places, how do we encourage them to come work for us?” he continued.

He said his “dream” is “to really create an environment for our clinicians that feels like private practice … but that you get to work with the patients that only we get to see.”

As for something he feels Bowen is doing well, Ryan noted helping provide services to those who would otherwise struggle to pay for it and working closely with local schools.

Another area where Bowen is doing good work is through helping people with substance use and addiction, said Ryan. That’s due to “integrating it with all of our clinicians,” he said.

“(From a patient standpoint), if I have to go talk to the substance use counselor and then I’ve got to go talk to the mental health counselor, I’ve got two people. Here because we try to train everyone on both of those areas, I can get both of those taken care of by one person,” he said.

Ryan mentioned “around 20% of (Bowen’s services) are connected in some way to substance use.”

“In life when you’re trying to deal with difficulties, you turn to the things that you know and often substance use and addictions start out with people turning to something to try and help,” he said. “It’s very rare that you would have a substance use that’s not connected to a mental illness and even though, it’s a chicken or egg thing, we say substance use issues are a mental illness.”

He noted Bowen provides treatment related to drugs and other substances in both in-patient and outpatient settings and via “the court systems to provide services both in and outside of jails.”

Dealing with mental health is important because it involves “life and death situations,” said Ryan. He mentioned how he and his staff are saddened when they see an obituary for someone who took their own life and didn’t reach out for help.

Thus Ryan has the goal for Bowen “that we’ve expanded the type of person we see, the number of people that we see and the ways we see them.”

“And we just try to find an end around the stigma … to just set that aside and say we don’t care how you want to come see us,” he said, referring to getting more people in Bowen’s doors through its move toward total health.

“We’ll see you in any way and then once you’re here (we hope to be) providing you that care that we know that’s effective to just stop those people that find themselves in a position where they feel that they have no hope,” he said. “There is hope.”

“Mental illness is an isolating disease that makes you feel that I have it worse than anyone else. No one understands and there is nothing that can be done, and all three of those things are the lies that illness tells us,” he continued. “I think that’s really the passion for me is … not just to get more people through the turnstiles, it’s to save lives.”

People can help themselves or those they love by focusing on their mental health, said Ryan.

“One of the most important ways would be to have conversations with your family about what is a good state to be in? By state I mean a state of mind and a state of being and at what point should you reach out and get help,” he said.

That may include having an annual mental health visit just the same as one would have a physical checkup each year.

“You’re coming in for your annual mental health checkup, so that you can see how you’re doing compared over time and then I have a relationship with you, so if you do stumble and have a challenge, instead of you coming in and meeting me for the first time, I have … history to know where’s your normal operating temperature when it comes to happiness, sadness, and those different things,” he said.

“And so I think that’s what I would ask the community to do is to start seeing mental illness as something that much like those other ones, going to see someone is something that’s natural, something that you do and not only needed when things are at that crisis or emergency level,” said Ryan.